Kỳ Duyên, the reprimanded Miss Vietnam who now plays chèo’s great scandal

Kỳ Duyên

Photo: Photo by Anh John / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 16, 1996 Nam Định
Occupation	Model
Awards	Miss Vietnam 2014 · Miss Universe Vietnam 2024

Vietnam has a stock character for the woman who will not behave. She is Thị Mầu, the rich young woman of the chèo play Quan Âm Thị Kính, who sets her sights on a novice monk in front of the whole village and has been the scandal of the folk stage for generations. Kỳ Duyên spent the better part of a decade being cast in that part by the tabloid press, without anyone asking whether she wanted it. Now a film producer has asked. In the third instalment of the Sister Sister franchise she plays Thị Mầu, and the question hanging over the release is whether audiences will watch the character or the beauty queen they think they already know.

She also carries a name that belongs to someone else. Her full name, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên, is shared with the long-serving host of Paris By Night, the variety series of the Vietnamese diaspora, a coincidence that still trips up anyone searching for either woman. At home she is simply Kỳ Duyên.

From Nam Định to the first crown

She was born on 13 November 1996 in Nam Định, in the Red River Delta, a province since folded into Ninh Bình. French was her subject from the fourth grade: she went through the French-specialised classes at Trần Đăng Ninh lower secondary school and at the Lê Hồng Phong High School for the Gifted, and in 2014 she won a place at the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi.

She was a first-year student there when she entered her first pageant, Miss Vietnam 2014, and won it on Phú Quốc island at 18, together with the Miss Beach award. The result divided viewers. Part of the audience thought the first runner-up, Nguyễn Trần Huyền My, deserved the crown; the head of the jury, Lê Cảnh Nhạc, answered publicly that the scoring had been strict from the first round and that the outcome was fair.

The reprimand

What followed is why her name still comes up whenever Vietnam argues about what a beauty queen owes the public. Footage circulated of her smoking in a café, along with images that websites said showed her drunk in a bar. On 5 August 2016, a council convened by the newspaper Tiền Phong, the organiser of Miss Vietnam, concluded that smoking in public and gathering with friends in an unsuitable setting did not befit the title. It took her public apology into account, let her keep the crown and issued a formal reprimand. The contest dropped her image from its promotion and kept her away from the 2016 final, and on 28 August her successor was crowned by Tiền Phong’s editor-in-chief, Lê Xuân Sơn, rather than by her. The council added that the other rumours about her gave no grounds for a finding.

The episode says as much about the pageant system as about the 19-year-old at its centre. Miss Vietnam sells its winners as role models, and it policed this one on cigarettes and a night out. She did not make the case easy to defend. Months later, new images showing laughing-gas balloons sent the organisers back to examine whether they had the power to act a second time, and her reign passed without the international pageant appearance that normally follows a Miss Vietnam title.

The long detour

She rebuilt herself somewhere the organisers had no say: the runway. Designers began to book her as the vedette who closes a show, and television followed with mentor roles at The Look Vietnam 2017 and Vietnam Supermodel 2018. In 2023 she coached a team on The Face Vietnam alongside the supermodel Minh Triệu, her teammate on the 2019 season of The Amazing Race Vietnam.

In 2024, at 27, she did something Vietnamese pageant culture had not seen: she entered again. At the Miss Universe Vietnam final on 14 September she told the judges that, ten years after her first crown, she had found the courage to want to call out Vietnam’s name on an international stage. She won, becoming the first woman to hold both the Miss Vietnam and the Miss Universe Vietnam titles, and pledged 500 million dong of her prize to people hit by Typhoon Yagi. “I accepted the risk to fulfil a youthful dream and not regret anything,” she told Tuổi Trẻ. Some viewers were less convinced and asked whether the organisers had simply been afraid of her fan base. At Miss Universe 2024 in Mexico City, on 16 November, she reached the Top 30 but not the Top 12, and Vietnamese commentators pointed to her limited English.

From Karen to Thị Mầu

The screen came almost at once. Trấn Thành cast her in The 4 Rascals (Bộ tứ báo thủ), his Lunar New Year comedy, as Karen, the wealthy newcomer who comes between the characters played by Trần Tiểu Vy and Quốc Anh. The film opened on 29 January 2025 and broke Vietnamese box-office records in its first days. Her own notices were mixed: some reviewers found her stiff in a role built on her cool, guarded screen presence, and the newspaper Báo Văn Hóa used that season’s crop of beauty queens on screen to argue that they needed to invest more seriously in their acting.

The producer Will Vũ announced her as the first name in Sister Sister 3 when shooting began on 31 May 2026 in Bắc Ninh, the heartland of quan họ folk song, where the franchise moved after two films set in the south. Nguyễn Hữu Hoàng directs; Ninh Dương Lan Ngọc, Chi Pu, Steven Nguyễn and Quốc Anh share the screen with her, and People’s Artist Lê Khanh plays Thị Mầu’s mother. Vũ said he wanted to show sides of her other than the hard edge audiences expect, and that she had spent the preparation working on her acting. She admitted to the pressure, and to the joke the marketing was built on. “Both Duyên and Steven have been lucky enough to be remembered for somewhat thorny roles,” she said of the poster that pairs them, “so people will surely be curious to see two ‘villains’ standing side by side.”

Sister Sister 3 carries an 18+ rating and opens in Vietnamese cinemas on 30 October 2026. The US distributor 3388 Films, which took Trấn Thành’s Mai past $2 million in North America and Europe, has acquired it for the Americas, Europe, Australia, Taiwan and Japan. For the first time, audiences outside Vietnam will meet her through a scandal she chose to play.

Tags: actors, actresses, Chi Pu, Kỳ Duyên, Sister Sister 3, Miss Universe

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From Nam Định to the first crown

The reprimand

The long detour

From Karen to Thị Mầu

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